How Strategic Copywriting Ensures Active Readers Online

If you want your site visitors to read your pages and take action, then you need to replace your boring filler copy with strategic copywriting. The goal of every web page should be to be read. Once a page is read, the goal should be to get the reader to take some sort of action. It seems pretty obvious. However, take a random sample of websites and choose pages within them and you will soon discover that being read is not a priority for most pages.

Plan your visitor’s site experience

You can ensure readership and action by planning and including your target’s wants and needs early on in your online marketing process. Your site visitors are not browsing. They also don’t click on your site for entertainment. For most businesses, visitors are on your site looking for information that meets their wants and needs. When you make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for, you have a better chance of turning those visitors into customers.

Planning your visitor experience is pretty straightforward. Understand their wants and needs, and provide them with answers and information in a simple, easy-to-understand sequence. Your sequence of steps invites them through a process that helps them solve their problem and converts you into a sale.

Strategic copywriting drives your visitor experience

Strategic writing involves more than writing the content for the pages of your site. It also involves architecture of your site and planning how the pages work together to create an information and/or sales funnel that ultimately leads to the action you want people to take.

It includes the design of a logical system using words and navigation instructions, and the presentation of relevant and interesting information that directs and convinces your visitor to do what you want.

Strategic writing involves creating web pages with content that is directly and specifically relevant to the viewer. It is information that:

• engages the viewer;
• invite them to become readers;
• ask them for small and easy positive steps;
• presents the least number of steps necessary;
• and use clear navigation; to
• Direct readers to a landing page.

It is on the landing page that they must decide to do something or nothing, to take action, a decision that has made it as easy as possible for them.

Strategic online copywriting should be like a moving sidewalk that your prospect walks on and then is taken to a destination that both the prospect and you want. It must be invisible and never attract attention. It’s writing that meets your business objective and brings your viewers closer to the actions you want them to take, like giving you your email or buying something.

Copywriting that is too clever, puns, or otherwise attracts attention breaks the smooth transition from viewer to reader to action taker.

Push your visitors to be viewers

I think it’s a big challenge to get site visitors. There are millions of sites competing for those eyes. The good news is that there aren’t many sites that strategically and purposefully manage the visitor experience. Once you have a visitor, you only have a few seconds to convert them into a viewer. Think of it this way. Your site is like a physical store. How attractive and engaging is your site? What does your sign say? Is it obvious what type of store or site you have? Are your hallways clean and uncluttered, or cluttered and hard to follow?

Everyone reacts the same way when they come to a new place. Each visitor instantly absorbs the page view and tries to make sense of it. They:

• they want to understand if the page is what they are looking for;
• they want to see if they can read the page easily;
• find immediately easy-to-use navigation;
• and decide if they feel comfortable with the site, or if it seems like too much work.

You earn your first click in about a tenth of a second. Either by clicking (scrolling) under the fold or by checking the main navigation for useful content. If visitors can immediately see what they’re looking for, or promise to find what they’re looking for, they’ll stay a few seconds longer.

The next challenge is presenting them with an easy-to-understand navigation system that gets them where they want to go. Add headings and subheadings that point to interesting content that promises to answer your questions, and you just might get a scanner.

A scanner hovers over the page, reading the subheadings to see where they lead. Your visitor hasn’t yet committed to reading your page because they need to know if the site delivers what they expect.

Turn your viewer into a page scanner

Our job, as business owners, marketing managers, and strategic planners, is to provide enough information, instantly, so that our visitor, who has just become a viewer, can make an immediate decision to scroll down our page or click in a link. Your name, brand, tagline, and main title are supported by the design, logo, and colors. This is a truism that is often overlooked. Keep in mind that the design supports the content, never the other way around.

Potential customers aren’t looking for the prettiest website when they do a search and click on a link. That actual person who clicked on her site is looking for specific information that she wants and needs right now. The easier you make it for them to understand if you have the information they want, the more they will like and trust you. That means they’ll want to stay a while and come back too.

Use headings and subheadings as information cues

In order for your viewer to take action and start scanning your page, you need to provide some bookmarks. It’s a bit like looking at a landscape. First you see the horizon framing the house, which is next to the tree behind a fence across the street. You see it all and then you focus on the elements and the parts.

On a web page, viewers look for familiar landmarks and signs. The headlines and subheadings are familiar to all of our viewers from reading newspapers and magazines. Strategic writing uses headings and subheadings to engage the viewer and invite them to scan the page content by reading the subheadings.

When subheadings are written strategically, they provide an overview of the page’s content and let the scanner know if this is what they’re looking for.

Turn a scanner into an interested reader

When you provide provocative teaser-style captions on the pages of your site, you invite your viewer to scan the page and immediately see where the information leads. That saves your viewer wasting time. They’ll like you for it because you’re doing most of the hard work to help them find what they want quickly.

Your strategically written subheadings should lead the reader through your page to a call to action. Depending on your sales funnel, that call to action could be clicking a link, entering an email address, or adding an item to a shopping cart. The important factor is to remember that strategically planned copy engages visitors, converts them into readers, and drives them to take action.

Without readers, you would never make any sales from your site. If you want to increase your site’s conversions, no matter what the goal, make your site a pleasant and easy-to-understand destination for your visitors. Getting visitors to read your content is how you present your offer and move towards making a sale. Strategic writing is the way to get those readers in the first place.